It feels just right to write about friendship. It means so much. To me, a friend is someone I don’t want to lose, though I have lost some. I’ve had others for almost all my life.
I try hard and hold tight, yet I regret a few departures. Most, not all, my fault, at least in part. But today, I’ll tell you how to make and keep them. We must lose something or someone before we understand their full value.
Acquiring a friend involves a kind of courtship. Given the possibility of rejection, risk is involved. People are busy and have prior commitments. And then some don’t “cotton to you.”
Google tells us this:
To ‘cotton to’ is an idiom born of the cotton industry, meaning to get to know or understand something. In the textile industry, when a fiber cottons, it does a good job of blending in with other fibers to make cloth. Example using the idiom: ‘I don’t recon that boy cottons likely to strangers.’
Platonic friendship, of course, is a different type of closeness from that of a lover, but not automatically less. A chum who came along before the beloved recalls experiences the significant other doesn’t.
Jealousy may occur between an old friend and a new sweetheart. Repeated interaction between these two is the best solution to relieving the implicit threat. The relationship adapts, and all parties must adjust to the cast change and their new positions on stage.
Platonic attachment involves many hours of experience. The glue takes a while to dry. Opening up to each other and building trust are essential for closeness.
We make our first friends in school or in the neighborhood. Each of us is thrown into situations and places. These include taking classes, attending a church, synagogue, or mosque, walking the same route to school, riding the bus, and sitting side by side.
We play games, decide to join identical extracurricular activities, and later on, meet new people at our place of business.
Friendship requires frequent contact, especially when it is being formed. Work tends to offer fewer intimate possibilities when Zoom creates the meeting place instead of the office.
Events after the job can substitute, but many countrymen are lonely. According to Vivek Murthy MD’s 2023 Advisory, we have an epidemic of loneliness tending to cause problems in mental and physical health: Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.
The World Economic Forum offered a comparison of our 2021 social lives to similar data obtained in 1990:
Just 13% of US adults (said) they (had) 10 or more close friends, compared with 33% of those surveyed in 1990.
The growth of friendship often entails the establishment of rituals: attending ball games and concerts, meeting at favorite restaurants or in different cities at conferences or museums, creating a book club, and scheduling Zoom meetings to chat.
In a mobile and virtual society, in-person social pursuits are more challenging to arrange than before. Skin hunger (touch starvation) was frequently mentioned during the Pandemic and still exists. Dogs and cats provide a version of the experience of physical contact.
Connection with an animal differs from friendship but shouldn’t be diminished in importance. Depending on various factors, the loss of companion animals can be as profound an event as the death of a man or woman.
Research suggests spending time with a friend enhances mental health more than with a mate, particularly after the metaphorical honeymoon is over. Routines that can overtake and deaden some marriages are less likely with someone you spend less time with and don’t live with. Moreover, the activities typical of friendship do not include doing the chores, paying the bills, managing the children, and similar stress producers.
One might say get-togethers with friends are “chosen,” while time with a spouse runs the risk of being “frozen.”
No wonder we are advised not to go into business with a friend. The duties, responsibilities, decisions, division of tasks, and issues surrounding money reproduce some of what can undermine wedlock.
Between the 18th and early 20th centuries, it was common for the most profound relationships to involve individuals of the identical sex. That was a period of arranged alliances and minimal premarital romance. Single young ladies of status were accompanied by a chaperone outside the home.
Married females remained in the family residence with a duo’s many children, while the husband spent time in the world among fellows like himself. Same-gendered confidants shared more in common with each other in part because educational and apprentice opportunities for women were less available.
Aging makes it advisable to find new connections along the way, including individuals of different ages. Since some relationships end, others must be created. I met Dr. Mel Nudelman in 1975 when he was almost twice my age—a closeness that grew. It ended with his death in 2012 when he was over 90. My more recent comrade Jim is over 30 years younger than I am.
One feature of friendship involves duties to each other. In clinical practice, asking a colleague in the same discipline to take emergency phone calls while you go on vacation isn’t unusual. When my late friend Dr. Joe Pribyl recuperated from a severe illness, I took on the therapy for a patient of his who needed attention during the months when Joseph was incapacitated.
Running errands, getting food, and watching a pet are kindnesses fitting among cronies. So is consolation and advice.
Remembering birthdays offers a further small but meaningful extension of oneself.
Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil wrote about offering solace to a suffering soul, a circumstance everyone encounters. Listening is at the center of giving such support to a friend.
Murdoch believed the comforter must “unself” himself, erase his ego, and focus 100% on the other. This type of interaction demands that the person providing aid not think of the next thing he wants to say but devote himself entirely to conveying a sympathetic presence.
Weil believed this kind of attention is “the rarest and purest form of generosity,” which calls for one to “decreate” his own self-involvement and allow infinite patience and tenderness to fill the place where the ego existed.
One should avoid saying things like, “I know how you feel,” which is intended to soothe but displays the opposite: a lack of understanding. Presence and compassion, not solutions (unless requested), are enough.
Reaching out to old compadres with whom you have lost touch is worthwhile. The treasure to be rediscovered includes memories no one else holds or can create.
Shared recollections of parents, the old neighborhood, school, summer camp, games, and youthful friends of the past provide the groundwork for recreating your fondness for each other.
Wartime comrades recall experiences beyond the grasp of anyone who wasn’t present in the moment of combat.
The bonds of buddies are tested. Compromise is essential. People aren’t perfect or matched like a lock and a key.
The value of the pal must be weighed against what bothers or hurts you. A sober period of reflection can be helpful, rather than saying or doing something on impulse that breaks the link beyond repair.
For more on this subject, you can read my blog post, How to Apologize and How Not to Apologize: When Sorry isn’t Enough, or Aaron Lazare’s short book On Apology.
I will end on a personal note. I have a friend of almost 60 years, Al. Our bond has survived a test or two but continues to grow. We are both heterosexual men.
When I encountered physical challenges recently, Al told me he prayed for me. This would be unremarkable, perhaps, but for two facts. First, he is not a religious man. Second, he said that he loves me, not in a sexual way but in the other meanings in which this expression is understood.
Some men wait in vain for a father to express his love. The thought of a male friend doing so never occurs to them.
A friendship like this means the world.
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The three paintings were sourced from Wikiart.org/, while the photos came from Wikimedia.org/
The works are as follows: 1. The Women Friends, 1917 by Gustav Klimt, 2. Three Barefoot Females Smiling and Sitting Barefoot on a Bench by JLS Media, 3. Irena Solska by Stanisław Wyspiańsk, 4. Happy Friendship by சௌந்தர்யா சுந்தரம், 5. Friends at the Theatre: Ludovic Halevy and Albert Cave, 1879 by Edgar Degas, and 6. Friendship 3 by Gideon from Paris, France.
